Experts: W.H. must prep for shutdown

While Democrats and Republicans play a high-stakes game of budgetary chicken, the Obama administration is quietly preparing for an expensive government shutdown.

Or at least experts say it should be.

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Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew insisted Thursday the administration isn’t making any backup plans to ready federal agencies for closure — and that doing so might give the false impression that the White House has resigned itself to a shutdown.

But laws, guidance memos and people who’ve been involved in prior government shutdowns suggest that the administration should be getting ready — and likely has been for months.

"I'm sure they are," said Walter Broadnax, who served during the last government shutdown in 1995 and 1996 as deputy secretary and chief operating officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. "It'd be heresy to not do that."

Aside from the political brinkmanship and blame game exchanges, countless practical questions with real world consequences come quickly on the heels of a failure by the White House and lawmakers to reach even a stopgap agreement on funding the government.

Do Social Security checks and tax rebates go out? What happens to air traffic controllers, toxic waste cleanups and food safety inspectors? Will park rangers lock the gates to Yellowstone National Park? Who feeds the animals used for scientific research?

Statute dictates that "essential" services must remain in place to protect human life and property. But there's plenty of gray area for President Barack Obama and his cadre of White House lawyers, number crunchers and political advisers to play around with as the administration looks for the advantage with its GOP counterparts.

During the Clinton administration, White House and other administration officials started preparing for the prospect of a shutdown four months before the first five-day standoff that finally occurred in November 1995, according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing records.

Two months before the 1995 shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget ordered agencies to submit plans with estimates of the time it would take to close their doors and also to designate their essential activities.

According to several veterans of past spending battles, White House Counsel Robert Bauer will be the critical arbitrator if the current standoff leads to a government shutdown. Lew and Attorney General Eric Holder also would be key players. But the internal jockeying will still be intense.

"From my experience, there's always a difference between what the law actually requires and the way some officials try to interpret it or characterize it," said a former George H.W. Bush administration official.

The 1995 and 1996 shutdowns lasted a combined 27 days and cost an estimated $1.4 billion. During that time, the State Department stopped processing visa and passport applications, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms delayed permits, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nixed disease surveillance, the EPA halted cleanup at more than 600 toxic-waste cleanup sites, and the National Park Service shuttered 368 sites.

But President Bill Clinton found ways for other programs to keep going. The Social Security Administration, funded outside the discretionary spending process, made payments to retirees and Black Lung fund recipients, though the White House did initially furlough about 90 percent of its workers because they got paid through an incomplete appropriation bill. The Christmas tree on the Mall was deemed nonessential, but a public outcry prompted local electric utility PEPCO to turn the lights on for free. A private security firm helped control crowds.

"From the point of view of the administration, what you want is to make it as uncomfortable as possible so it will end," Alice Rivlin, the Clinton OMB director during the 1995 and ‘96 standoffs, told POLITICO. "But I think that air traffic controllers probably go over the line."

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CORRECTION: Corrected by: Burgess Everett @ 02/18/2011 10:31 PM
An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Walter Broadnax, a former deputy secretary and chief operating officer at the Department of Health and Human Services.